The Grouper Project

Grouper is a project aimed at helping newbies get up to speed on developing and understanding Ruby, web applications and the tools used to create them.

If you're a person just starting out learning web-design and web-development it can be a daunting task to decide what to learn first... should you start with ruby, rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, VIM, CoffeeScript,Git, Backbone, PostgreSQL, Sinatra, Rake, Cucumber, jQuery, ActiveRecord, HAML, ..... OK... you get the point right?

Grouper is intended to group experienced users and newbies together for a more pleasing learning experience.

Small groups will work together to create useful apps.

Now you may ask yourself, "Am I an expert or a newbie?"... well you could be BOTH! You could be a VIM Virtuoso,but a Node.js novice... an SQL Super-star, but an RSpec...( OK, no witty phrase here! )

So join one project as a mentor, and another as a novice!

The pilot app, which is simply called "voter", is a really simple web-app that allows members of the Elmhurst Ruby Meetup Group to vote on upcoming meeting topics.

Is it complete? NO! Is it flashy? NO! Is it something that a beginner can wrap her head around and suggestimprovements and tackle making those improvements with a bit of hand holding? YES!

Take a look at "voter" located at http://shanktest.herokuapp.com/ If you're amazed at how it works and wouldlike some explanations let's talk about it! If you think it crappy because it needs ( fill-in-the-blanks ),let's talk about that too!

Again... a big thanks to C. Bedrosian for creating this group, and Darren, Ray, Stu and others for their help and input.